May 2009

Part of what makes my cold climate garden cold is the fact that we live in the bottom of a valley, and cold air flows downhill and settles all around us. So however cold the weatherman predicts it will get, it's usually colder here. Often, ten degrees colder. For example, on May 12th, when a [...]

The Home Depot $100 Gift Card giveaway ended yesterday. Time to pick the winner. Out of 35 qualifying comments (two were my replies), the random number generator picked number 7, which was Suzanne Offner. Congratulations, Suzanne, and good luck building those raised beds! Thank you to Home Depot for making this giveaway possible.

FYI: Horse manure mixed with sawdust bedding is a wonderful soil amendment, until the pasture grass starts sprouting. Weeding grass today.

Spring has finally arrived at Purdville. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost some of my photo gallery features when I switched to this new design. You can click on each thumbnail for a larger image, but then you have to use your browser's Back button to get back to the thumbnails. Also blooming: Creeping phlox [...]

Mystery Flower Up in the Woods We have lived here for almost twenty years now, and yet almost every year I discover a new wildflower growing up there. I don't know how much this is due to the maturing of the the woodlands, and how much is due to my making more of an effort [...]

Home Depot wants you to check out their garden club, and they're offering a $100 gift card to one Cold Climate Gardening reader as an incentive to go take a look. I had registered with their garden club a long time ago, but hadn't been back in quite a while, and they've added a lot [...]

Dottie over at D and G Gardens and Crafts blog asked me what I was doing differently this year in my garden. I'd have to say there are no dramatic changes, just a shift in emphasis. I'm trying to work harder at maintaining what I have, rather than adding a lot of new plants. I [...]

Carol's done it. Mary Ann, the Idaho Gardener's done it. So has Mr. McGregor's Daughter and Cindy from My Corner of Katy and M Sinclair Stevens from Zanthan Gardens. They've all used a reciprocating saw to prune woody plants. Not only have they pruned with a recip saw, they raved about how easy it made [...]

Frost advisory tonight. Just covered a gazillion precocious plants. Had to use a kitchen garbage can for the lilies, that tall already.